Well, Brexit has been postponed again until Halloween, at which point Parliament will have probably girded it loins, picked itself up by the bootstraps, and other assorted figures of speech that connote hard work and taking responsibility…and of course I’m joking. MPs will keep fighting amongst themselves and agree on nothing, and Brexit will probably be cancelled. In the meantime, British gaming stocks are depressed thanks to months of business uncertainty and the Triennial Review, and they’re offering some really great yields. Sometimes these can be value traps, but there are many that are genuinely good long term buys.

The difference is, value traps have structural problems that endanger dividends, sucking you in with a momentary high yield print that won’t last because dividends will be cut. But when we’re talking about established companies with good finances and more or less stable markets, a high yield should not be passed up. It won’t last either, but not because dividends will be cut.

William Hill can be bought here for the long term. A dividend yield above 7% for a company like this is not something that shows up often. The stock is near 2009 levels and it won’t last. One could argue that dividends might be halted temporarily as they were at the end of 2008 at some point, but even if they are, you’ll still have the same number of shares and there is little danger of payments to shareholders being suspended for the long term.

It’s true that William Hill didn’t have its best year in 2018, but a look inside the numbers shows that there aren’t any structural issues here that the company can’t overcome. In fact the situation now looks similar to the 2008 lows when revenues were still up in the context of a collapsing equities market. Shares collapsed 70% in a year while revenues and operating profit were still rising despite the chaos unfolding in the global economy. All the decline really said was that holders of William Hill were being hit by margin calls in other positions and were forced to sell across the board to meet them. That’s not what’s happening now but we still have solid fundamentals in the context of external instabilities due to factors completely out of its control.